


“With a mazy motion”

by deepandlovelydark



Series: That Deep Romantic Chasm, or Journey to the Center of the Neath [1]
Category: Fallen London | Echo Bazaar, MacGyver (TV 1985), Sunless Sea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-09-14
Updated: 2017-09-14
Packaged: 2018-12-29 17:44:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,989
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12090138
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/deepandlovelydark/pseuds/deepandlovelydark
Summary: This is Pete Thornton: former DXS exec, senior operations director at the Phoenix Foundation, with years of experience in the keeping of secrets.This is Becky Grahme: bright young academic, with a crazy notion about five cities vanishing to a sunless sea.Guess who's going to win this argument?





	“With a mazy motion”

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Tanista](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tanista/gifts).



> So, here's the deal; the good Tanista asked to borrow the Fulgent Engineering setup for fic purposes, and I said sure, and then I got distracted and committed fic with someone else’s OC (Mac’s niece, to be precise). And that's how a spin-off series happened! 
> 
> The general concept of the Phoenix Foundation's involvement with the Grand Sanction, and reconciling an everyday 1990s with 1890s Neath weirdness, is common to both this series and "Ecstasy in Cosmogone". But it'll be taken in different directions here. A rather more family-oriented version of the Innocent Spy, his niece Becky, and more detailed (and humorous) explorations of Fallen London. 
> 
> I borrowed the idea of Pete's former-Phoenix-director-confidant from MacBeth’s fic “Phoenix Rising” (though Helen's actually from "D.O.A. MacGyver," originally), and James West and Artemus Gordon are from “The Wild Wild West”. There is a lot of borrowing going on in this fic, basically.
> 
> Copyright items: Fallen London is © 2015 and ™ Failbetter Games Limited: www.fallenlondon.com. This is an unofficial fan work.
> 
> MacGyver is copyright either Paramount or Lee David Zlotoff, depending. Certainly not mine.

“There’s a lady here to see you. I rather think you should,” Helen tells him. 

Pete Thornton sighs; he’s got a busy day ahead of him. On top of his intended work, which wasn’t any picnic to begin with (why must it be so hard to get good field agents?), now he’ll have to cook up a plausible excuse for giving Jack Dalton a Phoenix Foundation charge card...“Tell her I’m busy and she should come back tomorrow - in fact, tell her to come back next week. I’ve got a lot on my plate as it stands.”

“Don’t make me pull rank on you, Peter. It’s Becky.” 

Becky Grahme. MacGyver's niece. Well, that’s different. 

“And I let myself in anyway,” Becky says, tucking a Swiss Army Knife into one pocket as she steps into the office. “Hi, Pete. Nice to see you.”

“How’d you do that? Nobody except- “ Pete stumbles to a stop, allowing the name to hang unspoken. 

“Nobody except Uncle Mac could get through your door when it’s locked,” Becky finishes calmly. “Yeah, he showed me how to do that before he left, in case I ever needed to know. Funny coincidence, ‘cos it was him I wanted to talk to you about.”

“So I’ll just leave the two of you to that conversation,” Helen informs them, and leaves without ado. 

She never had approved of his sending MacGyver on that last mission, Pete reflects. Understandable. There’s been more than enough nights over this last year where he hadn’t approved either…especially with the welfare of his best troubleshooter’s niece to consider as well. 

“So, how was your summer abroad? Did you enjoy Italy as much as you’d hoped?” 

After months of listlessness (Mac would have been so disappointed if he’d known her grades had dropped from straight As to middling Bs), taking an internship at the Phoenix Foundation archives in Italy had unexpectedly caught Becky’s fancy. Pete had been ready to pull strings on her behalf, but it hadn’t been necessary - MacGyver’s reputation, even now, was such that anybody in the organisation was willing to do handsprings to do his niece a favour. It helped that she’d inherited something of her uncle’s knack with languages. 

“Oh, terrific. I got to polish my Italian, tried a lot of great pasta. And they let me use the library all I wanted. Learned a lot of things.” She pulls a sheaf of photocopies from her bag, slaps them down hard on the desk. “Including what he was doing last summer, before he disappeared-”

“Died, Becky,” Pete says gently. “It’s been a year, a whole long year now. If he was still alive, wouldn’t he have figured out some way to send us word? To tell us - to tell you - that he was all right?”

She ignores him, taps the topmost paper. “Field research on Kabulstan. A Viennese archeologist spent years trying to prove that one of the mountains there was the original location of the Garden of Eden. Officially his works don’t exist any more because the only copies were destroyed in a WWII library bombing, but we have it, and it’s marked ‘not for public consumption’. Now why in the world would we have a thing like this in our espionage library, and what’s so secret about it?” 

“Maybe we just haven’t gotten around to declassifying it yet? You should see how long British intelligence takes over these things.”

“This one, here? This is a copy of the Phoenix Foundation’s original charter. Didn’t you ever wonder why the organisation exists?”

“Everyone who works here knows that much. We even put up a plaque about it in the lunch room. Two former Secret Service agents, uh-“

“West and Gordon.”

“West and Gordon, yes, moved to Arizona and went into business for themselves. Part do-gooding and part - well, you know a little about the great game side of things,” Pete says, allowing himself a smile for the first time that day. “And we’ve always kept up our work in both, ever since.”

“And it sounds great, but read this. ‘The Phoenix Foundation will strive to serve all humanity, blah blah blah…but then at the end, it says ‘and will in perpetuity uphold the Grand Sanction, in nowise permitting its breach, as above, so below...’ - now what’s a Grand Sanction, I asked myself? So I went looking.” She sits down on the desk, scuffing the polished finish with the toe of her sneaker. “Do you want to say, or can I explain it?”

Pete shrugs helplessly; he has an uncomfortable idea that he’s dealing with someone who’s done her homework. Thoroughly. “Go ahead.”

“Conspiracy. Stretching back through all of recorded history. Maybe even longer than that, but it’s a fact that five cities have gone missing, different cultures, different continents, nobody knows how or why, but without even archeological ruins left. Nothing. And the same motifs keep cropping up whenever anyone talks about them, bats and things, and legends of how they went down to a sunless sea, just like in Coleridge-“

“Becky, listen to yourself! You're seeing things and inventing patterns that aren’t there, just because you don't want to admit the truth! I'm just as sorry as you are that your uncle's dead, but you can’t keep living in denial forever. Sooner or later, for your own good, you have to come to your senses.”

Becky gives him a look. A particular, heavy-lidded I-can’t-believe-I’m-hearing-you-be-this-silly look that’s apparently a MacGyver family trait. “You know, you almost had me believing that. That’s the part I really can’t forgive you for. That you’d hoped I’d mourn, and move on, and forget all about him, you wanted me to do that!”

The injustice in her tone is outrageously familiar. “It’s only the truth. All right, I sent him out to Kabulstan to check up on some of this. And something went horribly wrong, and he never came back, so yes, I sent your uncle to his death. What more can I say? What more can you possibly expect me to say?”

To his surprise, she smiles. 

“Maybe I can set you straight on that. Look at these.” She pulls a final set of papers from the pile. Graceful Italian script, interspersed by occasional rough sketches. “These are from the irrigo files in Avernus, and you wouldn’t believe the trouble I had trying to find them, but I got them out eventually. Letters from the 1890s, one of the officers on a ship down there was corresponding with her sister in Italy. She writes a lot about their engineer. About the duck tape he uses to fix things, about his crazy friend called Jack, how he's from Los Angeles and loves ice cream and has a red-handled pocket knife...”

"Becky, many people have friends named Jack. And like ice cream. And even carry pocket knives.”

“She calls him the innocent spy - doesn't that sound like Uncle Mac? And then there's this. I know you don’t read Italian, so I’ve translated it for you and blown up the font size.”

Pete peers at it. 

. _..I have, as the Innocent himself might say, 'hit upon' an appropriate Neathmas gift for him. He has an excellent memory for nautical features (unlike some students I could name), so I took a chance and inquired whether his recall of his own home port was equally thorough. The consequent flood of nostalgic reminiscence was sufficiently detailed for me to sketch a fairly detailed chart. With a few alterations to fill in the lacunae (the odd dragon and so forth) it came out rather well. I enclose a copy for your amusement...."_

"And this is it. See?”

“A chart of the waters around Los Angeles. Becky, this looks perfectly ordinary.“

"That's the point! See the breakwater here?”

"...yes?”

Her voice is utterly triumphant. “It didn’t exist yet! The port’s whole breakwater, they’d only just started that in 1899, and it wasn’t finished for years. There’s no way that the artist could have known what it’d be like, but there it is, just the same as if you went out and looked at the harbour now.”

"So on the basis of one detail, in a map that the artist herself admits that she was making up, you've concluded-"

"That my uncle's alive, yes. That after he went to Kabulstan he managed to get stuck in the past somehow, that he hasn't sent a message because it might change the future and who knows what'll happen if he does that, and that he's still there. Also that I’m going to go and find him."

"You're determined to do this.”

"Yes."

"Then why come and convince me? Since you're set on going regardless?"

“Well. If I don’t come back, it’d be rude to have not said my goodbyes first - you and Nikki and everyone else who helped look after me. But also, I needed to know how much trouble I was getting into. And whether anyone was going to try and stop me.”

Pete raises his head and looks at her properly, for the first time. There’d been a lot of good-natured jokes at the Foundation over the years, about Mac the consummate bachelor suddenly having family to look after. And yet he’d managed, had successfully raised this spirited young woman. Who had so calmly infiltrated the best-kept conspiracy on the planet. Who has stolen secrets her uncle wouldn’t have dreamed of seeking. Who is now proposing to go into the centre of whatever-the-hell-it-is down there that the Phoenix Foundation has worked so hard to protect humanity from. Just out of love, and a dash of why-ever-not thrown in for good measure. 

He thinks of his own Michael, serving time for treason in a federal pen, and finds tears coming to his eyes. 

_What did he do right that I didn’t?_

His years behind the desk stand Pete in good stead now: it’s the career bureaucrat who musters an eventual response. “You know, this solves a little problem I was having. Jack Dalton came to see me last night, making a request very much like yours-”

“Aw, he wants to go rescue Uncle Mac too? How’d he work it out?”

“He didn’t. He’s just being his usual pig-headed, idiotic self, but he talked me around to funding his trip to Asia just on the off-chance. I’ve changed my mind about that now. Do you think you can handle a Phoenix expense account without completely destroying the organisation’s credit?”

She grins. “It’d buy a lot of chocolate. Sure you want to trust me that far?”

“Between you and Jack Dalton? Oh, you. Definitely. And I’ll say this, I’ll be expecting results for it. When you two come back I want to see MacGyver with you, and he’d better be in one piece.”

“Done.” 

They spend a few minutes on the logistical details, before the day gets going and Pete absolutely has to take his first official visitor. Becky leaves looking happier than she has in a year. 

“Never would have thought it of her. Tracing down her uncle like that…”

“Oh? Does she have a line on where to find him? I confess I’d like to know myself. Life becomes so uncommonly dull when I haven’t had a chance to attempt killing him for a while…”

Pete looks up at his visitor. It’s Murdoc. In a silly disguise. 

“For the love of-!”

“Pete, perhaps?” 

*********************

“At your age, taking down a professional assassin like that single-handed?” Helen says afterwards, once security’s arrived and a thoroughly tied and gagged Murdoc is being carted off to the police station. “Incautious. But well done.”

Pete shrugs. “Working off some frustration, that’s all. Did I have a meeting with legal next?”

“Yes. I was fobbing it off on you because it’s only going to be a long list of dull and technical explanations, about the latest regulatory changes.”

“Dull and technical? Regulations? Right now, that’s music to my ears…”

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [A Miracle of Rare Device](https://archiveofourown.org/works/12097533) by [Tanista](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tanista/pseuds/Tanista)




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